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This article provides an introduction to the approach of the Scottish psychiatrist Thomas Ferguson Rodger (1907-78), as reconstructed from his archive. Rodger's contribution has been largely neglected within the history of Scottish psychiatry. This paper amends this neglect through situating Rodger's eclecticism in relation to both the biopsychosocial approach of his mentors, Adolf Meyer and David Henderson, and psychiatry's de-institutionalization in the 1950s and 1960s. It is posited that Rodger's eclecticism was a considered response to the pressures of this transitional phase to balance physical, psychological and social approaches, and a critical acknowledgement of the instability of contemporary psychiatric therapeutics. More psychodynamic than his predecessors, the importance of social relations for Rodger led him to acknowledge psychiatry's limitations.

This paper reconstructs a fragment of psychiatric-psychoanalytical geography, interfacing it with the ‘new walking studies’, centring on a walk conducted in 1935 by a man experiencing mental health problems in Glasgow, Scotland. This man, a patient of the psychiatrist Thomas Ferguson Rodger, had mobility problems that rendered walking difficult – prone to stumbling, staggering, wavering – but with the likelihood of these problems being psychosomatic in origin. Through analytic sessions enacting a kind of ‘make-do’ psychoanalysis, the patient reflected on his mobility problems, as when relating his own walking ‘experiment’. Explanations advanced for his difficulties mixed psychoanalytic tropes with a gathering self-awareness of how fraught childhood experiences, had created the frame for an adult existence continually shying away from wider encounters and challenges beyond the domestic sphere. Central here was forward momentum being lost, whether walking or advancing through a life-course, with material and metaphoric senses of being stalled or stuck – spatially, environmentally – constantly entraining one another. This case study is deployed to illustrate claims about the ‘worlding’ of psychoanalysis, and to offer provocations for how such a psychiatric-psychoanalytic geography fragment might be illuminated by work on the cultural geographies of walking.

On the Couch by Nathan Kravis takes a social historical route to unravelling the enigma of the psychoanalytic couch and the reclining analysand. Underexplored and 'undertheorized' until now, due to constraints such as case sensitivity, this work searches well beyond Freud's justification for the analysand's supine state: his declared aversion to constantly meeting the patient's gaze (p. 1). Here, through a remarkably varied melange of sources, Kravis, a practising psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry, sustains a cogent narrative of psychoanalysis's distinct 'choreography', that is, 'the "repressed" history of the analytic couch' (p. xi). As Kravis highlights in Chapter One, alongside this want of a substantial rationale for the use of the couch is its striking visibility in both the psychoanalytic community and widespread culture. Kravis's methodological approach, set out here, is thus to contextualize this exemplary status through undertaking a 'social history of recumbent posture' (p. 8). The first chapters unearth the different meanings Europeans have inscribed onto the act of lying supine, starting with the Classical Age. Diverse contexts of reclining are recovered in the chapters that follow. Chapter Two resurrects the 'ceremonial' importance of 'recumbence' (p. 28, original emphasis). Spotlighting the tradition of 'reclining dining', expressive of social standing and amusement (p. 11), at celebratory occasions such as the Greek 'symposion' and the Roman 'convivium' (p. 12, original emphasis), it then traces the adoption of supine states into sacred art (p. 28). Chapter Three views developments in 'furniture fashion' as an aperture onto changing models of home life and aesthetics (p. 43), exploring, for example, connections between the growing popularity of 'reclining chairs' suited to repose and dialogue, and the less solemn rule of Louis XV (p. 39). Chapter Four addresses how the theme of recumbent posture recurred in changing forms across 'portraiture' (p. 47), dwelling on mid-eighteenth-century representations of women, defiant and cerebral, in the act of reading (pp. 78-82). Chapter Five moves the discussion on reclining posture into therapeutic contexts, addressing the increasing prevalence of mobile seating such as the 'adjustable chaise-longue' and 'the Schlafsofa (sleep sofa or recliner couch)' (p. 99, original emphasis) for the unwell and wealthy coastal vacationers, from the start of the nineteenth century (p. 97). The particular nineteenth-century psychiatric culture in which Sigmund Freud was embedded is revived in Chapter Six: physiological and psychological therapeutics such as 'hypnosis, hydrotherapy, cutaneous and electrotherapy, phototherapy, diet and rest cures' necessitated lying down, thus entangling 'recumbence and cure' in medical and lay mindsets (p. 115). Unravelling its 'romantic' and 'asylum' derivations (p. 127), Chapter Seven locates Freud's therapeutic employment of the couch in his late-nineteenth-century use of 885055H PY0010.